Total Members Voted: 50
Top Windows writer abandons Microsoft Sees the light and buys an AppleBy Nick Farrell: Tuesday 12 September 2006, 08:29 MICROSOFT DEVELOPER and writer Pete Wright has had enough of Vole and has bought an Apple.Wright says that after nearly 15 years on Voleware, including working for Redmond, he has got thoroughly bored with the outfit.Writing in his bog he said that Microsoft had become the IBM of the software world. Wright revealed that he is on Vole’s ‘influencer' lists, which are email lists where Microsoft people try to get me to tow the company line and say great things about it.Now he has taken a role as Director with a company at the leading edge of the "Web 2.0" curve. His team will write Ruby on Rails code, use Macintosh computers to do so, shun Microsoft technology completely, go to work in shorts and sandals and blast each other with nerf guns. As a parting shot to Microsoft, Wright says that its super soaraway Vista operating system is a pile of crap compared to Mac OS X and Ubuntu with GLX. Its software is buggy, overpriced, and stress inducing. "Their development tools are staid, designed and developed by committees to solve every problem you could ever conceive of, while being ideally suited to solving none."
To their own frustration and to the frustration of their users, big CD/DVD burning companies Roxio, Alcohol and Ahead Software (makers of Nero) are facing a huge problem in getting their software packages to work with Vista.According to Alcohol Soft, the maker of Alcohol 52% and 120%, Microsoft is blocking its ability to ensure compatibility: They have actually placed a hard block on the device drivers for the time being, to stop the virtual drives from loading. It is more than likely in place to help them beta test Vista without having reports from beta users regarding virtual drives, which might complicate things. We are working with them at the moment to ensure there are no incompatibility problems in the future.As a result, “As of this time Alcohol 120% will not work in Windows Vista Beta, although we do hope to support it once we get past the RC1 release and further,” Alcohol Soft says.Roxio and Nero cannot be definite about the compatibility of their product either. Roxio says that EMC Version 9 is Vista compatible, but Vista is a moving target, so we can’t assure 100% compatibility until after Vista is final and released. We may have to release an update at that time, but we are committed to doing so if necessary.Nero is “currently working on” reliable compatibility but could not commit to anything more definite “at this stage”.However, Vista RC1 users report that Deep Burner (shareware) and ImgBurn (donation-ware) are working.APC gave Microsoft ten days to provide a response to Alcohol Soft’s claim, but at the time of publication, it still hadn’t responded since its initial acknowledgement of the enquiry.
http://www.apcstart.com/site/tgaden/2006/09/1455/microsoft-deliberately-blocking-disc-burning-software-in-vista-claims-alcohol
Windows Vista RC1 gives great gaming experience First INQpressions Half Life Episode one on Vista eats a modest 826 MBBy Fuad Abazovic: Wednesday 20 September 2006, 21:04 WE PLAYED with Vista for a few days and on our test machine Vista Aero "Eva" Glass works just fine. We decided to use the Gainward 7800 GTX 512 MB card and we can tell you that the Vista performance determination tool rates this card at 5.8 which is more than good enough for Vista. You need to score between four and five to be able to run Aero Glass, the Eva Glass like sexy graphic user interface. After we played with the user intertface for a while we decided to try to play some games under the mighty upcoming DirectX 10. The card that we tested is DirectX 9.0c only as there is absolutely zero DirectX 10 hardware at the moment, but we didn't have any problems to play this very popular game. We decided to use our Athlon 4000+ - a good old single core CPU - and we plugged 2x512MB of Kingston HyperX DIMM Kit 1024MB PC4300 DDR CL3-4-4-8-1T (PC533) but we clocked it at a rather standard 433 MHz. After installing Episode One, we wanted to see whether at least we could run the game. To our immense happiness and ecstatic surprise, the game ran without any problems, and the performance was rather good. At 1280x1024 with the FSAA and Aniso on and all other settings at high we were getting between 40 FPS where we had a lot of reflections to 120 FPS in some less demanding scene. On average, we were getting 80 FPS which was not that bad at all. We took some memory screenshots as it transpired that Vista needed only 800 from the available 1024MB of physical memory. To save myself from answering some mails, we know that the Page file is not the same as the physical memory that we like to call RAM but it reflects how much memory was used. Overall Half Life 2 episode one is working great under Vista. After all this new operating system has some gaming potential. I can easily advise to prepare you for getting an additional 1 GB of memory. Two GB should be the optimum for Vista ultimate gaming experience as the games such as FEAR and Battlefield 2 already wants more than 1 GB even under XP. We think that Vista Release Candidate 1 has a lot of potential but there are still a few bugs that we would like to see fixed. Some of the SATA drivers are acting weird as my older 120 GB SATA one drive tends to crush explorer but just when you browse this drive while the other 160 GB one works flawlessly. Well MS has some three months to fix the bugs before it ships the OS. We will try more games and will let you know about it. µ* BUT PERHAPS it would be wise to wait until Vista Aero and Eva and Harta Glass are released before you buy a graphics card, No? Ed.
All Microsoft Vista versions will fit on one DVD Brain the size of a planetBy Nick Farrell: Friday 22 September 2006, 07:06 SOFTWARE GIANT Microsoft has just come up with a wizard wheeze to save a bit of cash on the distribution of its super soaraway and still futuristic Vista operating system.Vista is going to have six versions ranging from the most basic to the Vole's Voyce version, with more bells and whistles than a convention of one man band performers. However this creates a few distribution problems as Vole has to organise six different DVDs.According to PC World, Microsoft has decided to stick all the versions on a single DVD. This will mean that anyone who wants to upgrade to a better version later will already have the disk. All they will have to do is phone in to get the software key to upgrade it.While this move will make it easier to upgrade, it also will mean that for the price of the most basic model and a product key 'borrowed' from a neighbourhood hacker you will have the full range of Vista at your fingertips. All this will come from a high-quality legitimate disk costing $199 instead of $399.
Latest Vista RC1, build 5728, won't work Uninstall it, advises VoleBy Fuad Abazovic: Tuesday 26 September 2006, 10:22 AFTER we discovered Vista was up for grabs, I went to the Vole's site and downloaded it. You can find the original story here.We have to praise the Vole as it has fast server but this has to be at least six DVDs that we burned to follow up this Beta story. We tried Beta 1, 2, a few non-public betas and two RC1 versions. And it all worked, more or less, on our test rig except for the latest one. Build 5728 didn't want to work and after a few hours of upgrading from my existing RC1 build 5600 I just kept seeing the good old BSOD - Blue Screen of Death. The Vole advised us to uninstall this build so we did. And eventually we managed to boot our Vista RC1 5600 without any issues. To summarise the latest build, build 5728 didn’t work. If you still want to burn some time and DVDs, be my guest and do it. And, if you don’t mind, please drop me a line and let me know what was your experience with it. If you don’t want to experiment and want a working Vista, I advise you to get the Vista RC1 5600.
Microsoft to rip your head off if you pirate Vista Sort ofBy INQUIRER staff: Wednesday 04 October 2006, 15:13 SOFTWARE FIRM Microsoft said that server and desktop versions of Vista will have a protection scheme to shut down people who try to use counterfeit versions of the operating system.The software protection scheme will limit features of Vista counterfeit software. If a legit product key is not activated in 30 days, Microsoft Vista will go into "reduced functionality mode".Now we know what you're thinking, but this is what Microsoft means. Vista will let you use a browser but not all the time. Microsoft said: "Windows Vista will have a reduced functionality mode but one that is enhanced."The screen will show a little sign saying "this copy of Windows is not genuine", while Aero won't work and the ability to use a PC will be impaired. µ
Reduced functionality mode will also disable Aero, the new Windows Vista interface, and any "Premium" or "Ultimate" features of the OS will be completely locked down. Additionally, users will only be able to obtain security updates marked as "critical." Other downloads and updates will not be available.This anti-piracy mode will also disable other installed applications such as Office, making it impossible for a user to edit documents. Users can view documents by using the web browser, but Microsoft has essentially designed the system to prevent "read/write" access. The general approach is quite clear: reduce the computer to a web browsing station and make it inconvenient to be a pirate. Microsoft has not taken the extra step and simply disabled the computer entirely, apparently in an effort to court users trapped by counterfeiters. It also has ostensible public relations benefits stemming back to the days of the WGA phone-home scandal.Unlike Windows XP, Vista will monitor the activation status of the computer even after the initial 30-day period. If the technology later decides that a key is no longer valid, through either a software update or via some other means, it will give the user another 30-day period to rectify the situation. This is where Windows Genuine Advantage comes in. WGA will not throw the machine into full reduced-functionality mode if activation has been completed once. Instead it will disable Aero, ReadyBoost, and Windows Defender, and it will display a persistent notice in the lower right-hand corner of the desktop that reads: "This copy of Windows is not genuine."
Who cares about Vista? It will be a huge load of horsecrap well after it is released in January
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